Paris Fashion Week: At Saint Laurent, an army of individuals

After the first few runway exits at the Saint Laurent show Monday night, I started to really wonder: was Hedi Slimane showing us old clothes? Was he presenting a collection, or just a parade of pieces? Was I being punked?

But that uneasiness may have been the point.

Slimane channels Saint Laurent through the lens of the L.A. art and music scenes. And this season, the late L.A. artist Robert Heinecken was the subject of Slimane’s portfolio of images, distributed to guests along with their invitations. Slimane was interested specifically in how Heinecken’s work addresses “the materiality of the photograph and the function of image and reproduction in contemporary society,” the show notes explained.

(It’s worth mentioning that Slimane’s interest in photography is personal; his own images have been exhibited around the world, and his portraits of rock gods are now on view in the exhibition “Sonic,” at Paris’ Fondation Pierre Berge-Yves Saint Laurent.)

Heinecken, who died in 2006, was known for taking photographs from old magazines and advertisements and recasting them, by inserting pornographic images, for example, to create something new. He was an appropriator and image manipulator just like L.A. artist John Baldessari, who was spotlighted in last season’s portfolio, and just like Slimane himself, whose clothing designs seem to be teasing and toying with our ideas about ownership, newness and the definition of luxury.

And so on Monday night, Slimane showed an army of individuals. Despite the fashion system’s craving for direction and trends, there really was no new look. There was the girl in the floaty, single-shoulder cherry print dress, worn with sparkly ankle strap platform pumps. There was the one in denim cutoffs (sure to cost a fortune) and a slim-line blazer that could pass for an original YSL design from the 1970s swiped from mummy’s closet. Then there was the model with a skinny red scarf at the neck and a green flat top hat atop her head, wearing studded leather capri pants like something out of “Grease” with a whip-stitched suede bomber that could easily be mistaken for the world’s greatest Goodwill find as fashion made in a Paris atelier.

The tailoring was probably the most enviable thing on the runway, namely flared pants and longer line, skinny blazers, worn with skinnier scarves. The rainbow spangled starlet dress, see-through blouse scattered with crystals, and black velvet cape embroidered with silver fireworks will as surely get you past the velvet rope today, as they would have in Saint Laurent’s day, when his original versions of those designs walked the runway.

Then again, what’s new, what’s old, what’s original and what’s appropriated, what’s a bargain and what’s a fortune, what’s fashion and what’s not? Maybe it doesn’t matter. It sure doesn’t to most modern women getting dressed. They wear what they like, not what a designer tells them to.

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